The playing of video games is a well-known aspect of human interaction with computers with many different objectives and strategies. Through the interaction of the game software with the computing device that runs the game, which may be a personal computer or an arcade game system or a mobile phone or some other computing device, images are made to appear on a screen and may be made to appear to move from place to place, either automatically or under the control of the player. The player has some means of input for control instructions such as a keyboard or a computer mouse.
Different computing devices can be linked by various means, including by means of electric cables, optical fibres or wireless networks as in the internet, mobile phone networks and other networks. On such networks a player may play games in cooperation with or in competition against other players each of whom may be in a separate location.
In the computer game industry there are specific names for the different software components and their visual representations such as are required to produce an image on the screen. Thus, sprites are used to prepare textures which are used to give visual appearances to objects and different instances of objects may be used in any one game possibly with different sprites or textures. Changeable areas of a display are also known as tiles and a player tile, which is moved about under the control of the player, is used in many games.
A playing area may be made of different tiles or of larger areas each sub-divided to give the appearance of separate tiles. In the latter case, the processing would involve keeping account of the position of the player tile on the larger areas and possibly adjusting the appearance of the player tile as necessary and placing additional tiles over the larger areas to represent changes in their visible states. In such a case the game does not necessarily rely on separate tiles to interact with the player tile for each move. However, to make a playable game, identifiable areas of some sort would usually be involved.
One type of video game is where a grid or grid-like display of tiles, representing the opponents in the game, approaches a player tile that is moved by the player so as to cover the different lines of approach and can be made to appear to shoot and destroy them. Typically, points are awarded to players according to their ability. In some games the play is made to speed up making play increasingly difficult and also in some games the player may begin with a certain number of lives that may be lost when wrong moves are made or accidents of one sort or another occur.
Some video games are derived from board games, such as knight-moves, which originated in chess. In knight-moves the knight is moved so that it takes different places on the screen-representation of the chessboard. In contrast to the previous case the player tile in this game can move to cover the whole board step by step.
Although entertaining, the games described above do not lend themselves readily to an educational environment or to advertising.
In view of these considerations, according to the present invention, a computer game system is provided where a player tile is part of a moving grid or grid-like display and can move through it. That allows for a more exciting type of game than a board game and games can be designed with this system that require the player to learn specific facts from the field of education to plan moves depending on the state of the various identifiable areas in the game.